Rain storms drive away drought that was creeping back in California, monitor shows

Jared Gilmour

Californians’ umbrellas have been put to good use for the last few weeks — and all that rain has helped drive away drought conditions that were creeping back, new data show.

“All of a sudden we went from people wondering when it would rain to people wondering when it will stop raining,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Spencer Tangen, according to SFGATE. “It’s almost as if a switch was flipped.”

As recently as Nov. 12, “abnormally dry” conditions blanketed nearly all of California, with stretches of the southeastern corner slipping into “moderate drought,” according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

But as of Dec. 10, only the furthest northern reaches of the Golden State are listed as “abnormally dry” — and there’s no drought left in the state at all.

“Another week of above-normal rainfall and mountain snow led to continued improvements in the Southwest,” U.S. Drought Monitor experts said Thursday. “In California and Nevada, rainfall over the last three weeks has helped to make up for the slow start to the water year, resulting in the removal of the abnormal dryness depiction across most of the state.”

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Those experts said remaining pockets of dryness were “in areas that missed the heaviest precipitation or where station data indicate below-normal snow.”

And there’s no sign of the wet weather letting up.

“Precipitation is likely to be above normal over the Pacific Northwest [and] parts of northern California” in coming days, the U.S. Drought Monitor experts wrote.

The map on the left shows U.S. Drought Monitor data from Dec. 10, revealing that only the further northern parts of the state are abnormally dry. The man on the right, from Nov. 26, shows most of the state suffering abnormally dry conditions.
The map on the left shows U.S. Drought Monitor data from Dec. 10, revealing that only the further northern parts of the state are abnormally dry. The man on the right, from Nov. 26, shows most of the state suffering abnormally dry conditions.

The U.S. Drought Monitor is a partnership of the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Back in mid-November, only about 18 percent of the state avoided falling into dry or drought conditions, while roughly 81 percent of California was “abnormally dry” and nearly 4 percent had slipped into “moderate drought,” the U.S. Drought Monitor showed.

The lurch to dryness in mid-November was a drastic change from just days earlier, when 82 percent of California was experiencing no dry or drought conditions and only 18 percent of the state was “abnormally dry.” And months before that, none of the state was in drought at all thanks to heavy winter precipitation that pulled California from persistent drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Some material in this story appeared in an earlier article by the author